Most organizations engaging in digital marketing and advertising must share data across their internal departments and with other organizations, that frequently includes personal data of individuals. As organizations pursue deploying privacy technologies to their operations, Data Clean Rooms (DCR) have become increasingly sought-after as mechanisms to facilitate data sharing for organizations with first party data. As per the IAB State of Data Report 2023, “64% of companies leveraging privacy preserving technologies are using DCRs.” DCRs are being used today for multiple advertising use cases:
As the use of DCRs matures, it is necessary for the industry to come to consensus on how DCRs operate, develop a collection of canonical use cases and standards for interoperability among the participants engaging in a DCR.
IAB Tech Lab Rearc Addressability Working Group has developed a set of common DCR principles, marketing and advertising use cases, and operating recommendations to help organizations better understand, evaluate, and implement a Data Clean Room. In addition, the working group is developing standards and specifications to enable interoperability for given use cases.
In July 2024, we released the Version 1.0 of Data Clean Room Guidance and first interoperability standard for private audience activation. Learn more about the final release here
This establishes common principles, functions, privacy enhancing technologies for Data Clean Rooms and outlines some limitations and guardrails when engaging with DCR
PAIR (Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation) protocol, originally developed by Google Ads team is a privacy-centric approach to enable advertisers and publishers to reconcile their first-party data for advertising use cases without the reliance on third-party cookies. PAIR relies on commutative cryptography which makes it possible to match the multiple-encrypted join keys (IDs, PII) without decrypting to cleartext. This is particularly powerful as a means to interoperate between Data Clean Rooms owned by different administrative parties. Room standards.
PAIR version 1.1 was finalized in July 2025. If you have questions, please contact support@iabtechlab.com
Built by privacy, measurement, and data clean room experts, ADMaP (Attribution Data Mapping Protocol) enables advertisers and publishers to securely share and measure conversion data without revealing user-specific details. The protocol leverages Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) like Private Set Intersection (PSI) and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to ensure privacy and data security.
The ADMaP protocol uses several privacy-centric steps – identity mapping, attribution computation, and report generation. These steps utilize Privacy Enhancing Technologies like secure multiparty computation cryptography and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to ensure secure, encrypted, private data handling, enabling publishers to share exposure data and advertisers to share conversion data without the risk of revealing user-specific information. The protocol also empowers data clean rooms to provide cryptographically guaranteed features that maintain the integrity and privacy of their client’s data.
AdMAP 1.0 was finalized in Feb 2025. If you have questions, please contact support@iabtechlab.com
Open Private Join and Activation was IAB Tech Lab’s first Data Clean Room interoperability standards. It has since been superseded by the donation of PAIR to Tech Lab by Google, which is now the de facto specification for activating matching audiences between two parties. OPJA if therefore a deprecated standard and no longer supported.
Please email support@iabtechlab.com for questions about Data Clean Standards